Eleanor Catton is the second New Zealander to win the Man Booker and one thing's for certain: many more people will read The Luminaries than did the country's previous winner, The Bone People by Keri Hulme in 1985.

And coming only a few days after the 82-year-old Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature, you could forgive Canadians for celebrating as well – Catton was born there and was six before her parents took her home to Christchurch.

Sizeable win: The six books of shortlisted authors for the Man Booker Prize 2013. Photo: AFP

At 28, Catton is also the youngest writer to win what is widely regarded as the most significant literary prize in the English language. It guarantees a massive boost in sales and profile.

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And if this year the £50,000 prize wasn't beset by scandal – genuine or contrived – that was largely because the quality of the shortlist garnered almost universal praise. Others on the list were bookies' favorite Jim Crace, Ruth Ozeki, Colm Toibin, Jhumpa Lahiri, and NoViolet Bulawayo.

Catton's is a timely win as well – next year the Booker is, despite fierce objections in some quarters, opening its arms to American writers and also adjusting the rules of entry, making them more restrictive for publishers.

'Dazzling': The Luminaries.

Administrators claim to be broadening its scope rather than simply making way for US authors, though the news has provoked disgruntlement on both sides of the Atlantic.

"I think it's generally a bad idea," Julian Barnes, who won the prize in 2011, told the BBC. "I fear that British writers will win it much less often. And often the Booker gives a platform to young writers and encourages them, and that, I think, is much less likely to happen."

Ironically, this year's six finalists already combine as many different nationalities. Crace is British and Toibin is Irish. Lahiri and Ozeki are respectively Indian and Canadian enough to fulfil current requirements, but both have dual US citizenship. Noviolet Bulawayo, who is Zimbabwean, lives in California.

The Luminaries is a take on the big, baggy Victorian novel. But while at more than 800 it's big, it certainly isn't baggy. The novel is intricately structured, with a narrative architecture based around the 12 signs of the zodiac and the seven planets and with each chapter half the length of its predecessor, adding pace and tension.

"It's a dazzling book, it's a luminous book, it is vast without being sprawling," chairman of the judging panel Robert Macfarlane, a writer and academic, said.

Set in in 1866 around a small town on New Zealand's South Island, it is a whodunit that begins when a Scot named Walter Moody interrupts a meeting of 12 men at Hokitika's Crown Hotel. At the heart of the novel is the mystery surrounding the death of one Crosbie Wells and the stories told by those 12 men.

''Maturity is evident in every sentence, in the rhythms and balances. It is a novel of astonishing control," McFarlane said.

It is a very different beast from Catton's first novel, The Rehearsal, published when she was 22, long listed for the Orange Prize and all about teenagers. Last month Catton told Fairfax Media she had wanted to write a book set in the gold rush on the west coast of the South Island since she was herself a teenager.

And after The Rehearsal she said she wanted to write a novel that was highly structured and conceptual. She used astrology because ''whenever a pattern is set up in this system – this planet in this sign etc – that will mean something in terms of what influences are brought to bear on the overall picture.''

Andrew Riemer described The Luminaries in his review for Fairfax Media as ''a remarkable tour de force, breathtaking in the layer upon layer of astrological lore it reveals''.

Catton's win continues a remarkable run of fortune for historical novels in the prize. Last year's winner, Bring up the Bodies, was the sequel to Hilary Mantel's Booker-winning smash hit, Wolf Hall, a brilliant portrait of Thomas Cromwell and the court of Henry VIII.

This year's runners-up Crace's Harvest (Picador/Doubleday) depicts a rural community on the cusp of wrenching change while fellow finalist Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland (Bloomsbury/Knopf) is a tale of two Indian brothers torn apart by political extremism.

NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names" (Chatto/Little, Brown) tells the story of a 10-year-old girl who chases the American dream from Zimbabwe to Detroit; Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (Canongate/Viking) begins when a Japanese-American novelist named Ruth finds the washed-up diary of a Tokyo teenager; and three-time finalist Colm Toibin's The Testament of Mary (Penguin/Scribner) gives a slender, charged retelling of the Gospels by the mother of Jesus.

Now in its 45th year, the Booker award has been sponsored since 2002 by Man Group, the world's largest publicly traded hedge-fund manager.

- with Bloomberg

4 comments so far

Ms Catton thinks there are sixteen ounces in a pound of gold. Wrong. There's research and then there's REsearch!

Commenter

Donovan

Location

Auckland

Date and time

October 16, 2013, 12:33PM

Pay that! Gold has always used Troy weights with 12 ounces to the pound.

I'm only eight pages into The Luminaries so I haven't come to the offending passage yet. With two young kids in the house I'm hoping to get there before the 2014 prize is announced...

Commenter

CDU

Location

St George

Date and time

October 16, 2013, 1:06PM

Congratulations Eleanor, it's a suburb book and well deserved honor.

Commenter

mvyner

Location

Date and time

October 16, 2013, 2:03PM

I'm thrilled by the win and also loving the book - about halfway through. A real tour de force indeed and congratulations to Ms Catton.